I am curious. Is it possible to give some sense of line break up in the epub format. For example, words knows how words end (with space) and even how words need to be broken up. I'm curious if it is possible to somehow to specify where words are broken up.

While this seems trivial... it's essential in asian languages. For example, the space in thai is used to signify the end of a sentence. For the reader however a sentence looks like a long word and if it's nearing the end of the page it needs some guidelines to know where it could be broken up correctly. BTW. The Sony ereader formats such books very weird. It just goes off page and you cannot see the words at all... anyone have a solution for this problem?

I don't know if this would work (I haven't tried it), but perhaps just enclosing parts of the sentence in <span>...</span> would be enough to allow/encourage line breaks between the spans rather than within spans?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justice Strike

For the reader however a sentence looks like a long word and if it's nearing the end of the page it needs some guidelines to know where it could be broken up correctly.

* could work, but it gives (if implemented correctly) a hyphen at the end of broken lines, which you probably don't want in Asian scripts.

& #8203; giving a ? is probably a problem of the default font, try one of these fonts.

if implemented correctly <wbr> should not show a hyphen. & shy; should however show a hyphen... but the implementation is flawed, and it is adviced not to use it.

As for not able to support the & #8203... the font being used is an asian font... perhaps i should define multiple fonts and only use a different font when i want to use the zero width character.... however it's a problem which is also seen in some webbrowsers so i'm not totally convinced it's just the font.

if implemented correctly <wbr> should not show a hyphen. & shy; should however show a hyphen... but the implementation is flawed, and it is adviced not to use it.

Sorry, I meant that & shy; could work but would show a hyphen (I've corrected the message now). As I said, <wbr> does not seem to be supported in ePUB, so don't use it, it's not a problem of implementation, but of the format specification.

In Thai, would you need to insert & #8203; between every two characters (is a line break permitted everywhere)? If that's the case, I believe that's only a workaround, and ePUB renderers should at some point suport proper linebreaking algorithms for different languages (especially if the rules are as simple as "break anywhere").

In Thai, would you need to insert & #8203; between every two characters (is a line break permitted everywhere)? If that's the case, I believe that's only a workaround, and ePUB renderers should at some point suport proper linebreaking algorithms for different languages (especially if the rules are as simple as "break anywhere").

i think you are correct. I was going to implement a line breaking algorithm though... to line break correctly for that language...